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January 4, 2015

Cultural Differences in Sports Anime And Manga

By omo

HN Matsuri Tokugawa

Ed from Vertical wrote a blurb about sports anime and manga and it is, in my opinion, the baseline. He covered a few things that are challenges or causes why sports anime/manga just don’t take off in the States.

Viz tried promoting Slam Dunk with the NBA. That didn’t work. They marketed Whistle! with US Soccer before a World Cup. That didn’t work. They partnered with the NFL for Eyeshield. That didn’t work. Were their plans perfect? No. But they sure tried and with some of the biggest brands in sports. Sports anime rarely seems to work in English. So tying in anime fans to their respective manga is almost pointless.

Story-wise most sports anime are high school based. That poses a problem cause the structure is different for sports in Japan vs the US. Sports in the US are league based, so teams play full seasons before a playoff tournament. In Japan high schools are almost entirely tournament only. So where in the US kids train thru playing games; in Japan they train to play games. Also as these works are fiction there is a lack of familiarity with characters and teams. It may be hard for casual readers to understand the rules of certain games if they aren’t already fans of that sport.

I would also say there might be some social resistance as faces and names are not what people see from their heroes in the US.

If you drill down on examples, yeah, Slam Dunk, Eyeshield, etc all have additional factors and issues as far as why nobody gave them a damn outside of Asia, but a fundamental one is the contextual one. Just like sports culture is ingrained in America mainstream consciousness, the same is for Japan. And when Japanese writers create sports stories they rely on those assumptions and cultural norms, which often don’t translate well to the States. High school level sports organization is entirely a different bag than the Japanese one for all the popular sports like baseball, basketball, etc.

I’m thinking these differences  even comes down to what people are looking for in entertainment in terms of narratives involving sports. Why do people read ESPN? SI? Or write Breaking Madden? Or watch 30 for 30? I don’t know, but I feel that’s kind of the mentality that ultimately has to be catered to for Americans to care about sports fiction.

And in order to get over that hurdle, maybe what it takes is either for people to buy in on the context (eg., anime fans who dig characters and the tournament plot), or for people who are in for the giggles and can live without it (eg., Shaolin Soccer). It’s like sports comedies.

It makes me wonder if anime/manga sports comedies actually have a shot at making it in the States. It’s never been done in a serious way, as far as I know. And probably not something like Teekyuu…

I wonder how anime/manga fans would feel about something like Friday Night Lights. Or maybe if someone made a manga adaptation. That’s the kind of issues, I am assuming, that western audiences of “sports” media would enjoy.

At any rate, I think we all need to understand this before going forward. Maybe it doesn’t really mean much; what are hits are hits. I do know that in general I don’t enjoy sports manga mainly for these kinds of reasons. The narratives about real life sports leagues, teams and players are so much better than what Japan’s fictional ones have to offer, partly because the fictional ones are usually about something else entirely different.

14 comments | posted in Popular Culture

January 3, 2015

Year In Review 2014: N-Listing

By omo

Just trucking along. Happy 2015 guys. Still celebrating Christmas for 12 days right?

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3 comments | posted in Aldnoah.Zero, Fate, Gundam, Hanayamata, Idolmaster, Introspectives, Nagi no Asakura, Ping Pong, Shirobako, Sora no Method, Wake Up Girls!, Yama no Susume

December 31, 2014

Year In Review: Lonely in a Sea of a Million Stars

By omo

If all I’m going to talk about THE IDOLM@STER this December, there are just two takeaways I want you to get even if you care nothing about them:

1. The mustard seed parable

2. The future, or how I started playing the mobile games.

I already explained the mustard seed thing. So.

Tokugawa Matsuri (Prologue Rouge)

Part of the otaku identity is a sense of self-inflicted loneliness. A lot of people–geek culture stuff–talk about it. This is particularly an amusing thing when I was reading on the GG/game culture stuff and how people found solace and identity through video games. At its extremes, that sort of identity politics can seem cultish, perhaps, but that is nowhere close to idol otaku who’s fell in the deep end, that I can see almost first hand.

But what I have to describe is not like this at all. It’s more like, because I started on the path of THE IDOLM@STER: MILLION LIVE, I begin to walk away from established IM@S fandom, at least in a way. It’s really ironic in a way because back in 2005 or whenever First Vision era started, that’s how people feel about Producers. Before it was cool thanks to Nicom@sPs, Producers meant you sat in dinky, smoky arcades and poured money while sitting down in front of a touch screen. I mean, like, how is that different than those of us who were grinding away at a Stamina Event in ML and had nobody to talk to, because nobody (who speaks English) plays ML? And yet for the past 3 years looking for Ps was what I wanted to do deeply. It was weird, familiar, and almost Ouroboros-ish.

Part of the problem is that the English-language IM@S community…is inadequate to say the least, if not outright a textbook example of the problems with online gamer communities. I mean, much of it is just 4chan, and I just didn’t have the time for that. It’s time I can spent playing the various games. ML was kind of an after thought because oversea scenster kids online are all chasing CG, if they were chasing IM@S at all (well, they all got shipdaughters now).

At any rate, let’s fast forward to today, where at least Derem@s Ps are getting a reprieve from loneliness through the growing player base for the mobage oversea, as well as from the upcoming TV anime. The Milim@s Ps are still a group missing in action in English. Newly engineered away from the tobacco smoke of the dying arcades, forged in the foundries of SNS and the 2.5D media mix school, Million Live is a wholly unique creature even by Japanese standards. But I fear the fandom for IM@S overseas is not ready for this pivot. I’m not even sure if they are ready for Derem@s, the poster child of gambling-like gasha schemes with an impossible-to-collect-them-all roster. After all, these games are no longer games of yore, where things like gameplay and concept can be understood without the meta, without the bizdev concept, where Da-Vo-Vi meant something other than gameplay concepts. There is no incentive for people to take the (possibly expensive) dive into a game where the rewards is just the same as any other gamer group identity–you are a P. Produce an idol (or three or however many). Except the rest of that support infrastructure–starting with the IM@S movie to the player base to the LTP and LTH to the numerous events to the region-locked radio show–is not available for oversea Ps. It is fully turned towards the Japanese 2.5D otaku.

It’s not like you can take these girls and run with them in a doujinshi. There aren’t that many ML doujinshi even, and those who traffic in the categorically pornographic, unauthorized doujinshi scan scenes can attest. This past month was the first Milifest, which is a ML-specific doujinshi event. It was the first doujinshi event I actively wanted to attend, ever.

Where am I going with this? Basically it becomes impossible to be really alone unless you go out of your way to be. Over the course of this year, since I started ML, I met people who play and now we have a small group of people who play the game both casually or seriously, and everything in between. I even started CG. Perhaps I am fortunate. If I am someone who latches onto new trends, then this is the one I did for 2014. If the people planning the IM@S franchise wanted people to play the game because of Moviem@s, well, it worked, at least with me.

But it just means for every whine about how ML were shameless tie-in characters or are underdeveloped fillers that dragged out an otherwise already draggy movie, they have a point and I can only nod and agree to an extent. What posed itself as a negative for some is just an opportunity and eye-opener for me. I’m not going to defend the shameless money-gathering scheme they’ve set it up, because in exchange I had a blast in 2014, in a big part thanks to those profit-driven enterprises!

It’s was a spectacle.  That’s the thing I enjoyed the most about 2014 x IM@S, at least looking back. The spectacle. The advertisement in Japan. The seiyuu lives. The oversea news. The new games and anime. Meeting new people. It’s exciting and fun.

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Leave a comment | posted in Idolmaster, Modern Visual Culture

December 30, 2014

Stupid Eligibility Rules

By omo

Production Schedule, Exodus

Just want to vent a little. I Just read that top 2014 anime post from Kotaku, and it’s just the cherry on top of a week of dealing with eligibility rules. Well it’s more like, how do you rank shows that are either split cour, ongoing, or was truncated? I think as a matter of rule it doesn’t really matter.

The long take is that as someone who has spent a lot of time over the years mulling over (although mostly in the saimoe-tournament-style nomination format), there are better ways to do this than others. The question is more like, what is the point behind doing something like that?

Isn’t this the kind of stuff you learn in civics and social sciences? Or even programming? How to write rules that make sense and to affect the outcome so it is desirable? I mean, the rule can be as simple as “only put pegs of the same shape into holes of the same shape” when playing with some toys for toddlers.

But ranking year-end anime series have even less stakes than trying to avoid putting square pegs into round holes (and damage the toy). I’m not sure how it compares to setting selection criteria for waifu wars but if the goal of ranking anime for something like APR or Kotaku is to get people to check out some highlights of the year, why bother with limiting things that are ongoing or split cour? Especially in the APR, it made no sense to me that when the endeavor is to rank anime on an episodic basis every week (and often voters don’t even get to watch everything for that week before submitting their ballots), somehow you now care for the whole shebang?

This eats me in two specific cases. NagiAsu and Shirobako.

By episode 3 I had already declared Shirobako as anime of the year. I don’t think my mind has changed by episode 13. In fact the 10 episodes since had cemented that opinion even further. Does this mean the next 13 episodes can undo my feeling about Shirobako as the best anime in 2014? Maybe, who knows what the future holds? But is it likely? Not by a long shot, and for two reasons. First, who the hell goes back and change ranking for last year for this year’s episodes? I’m sure such persons/things exist, albeit super rare (please link to such a thing if you know) but usually this is not why you set eligibility rules on split cours. It’s more because people feel it is unfair to either give a show 2 shots at AOTY, or that a show should be evaluated completely, or that it should be all available in case someone wants to check it out. However isn’t that just as arbitrary as giving a show 2 shots at AOTY or evaluating a series using any pre-defined length of episodes (1- or 3-episode tests come to mind)? I think it doesn’t really matter either way (and it’s fine to evaluate shows only on the whole; in fact I recommend this), but the second reason makes this worse.

The other reason is because these end-of-period rankings seek to capture a moment of time and preserve it as so. 2014 is coming to a close. These posts are more about what happened in 2014 than the anime these posts seek to rank. I mean why are we writing these posts anyway? Omitting something that happened in 2014 and say it’s something to be evaluated for 2015 may be kind of neat in that you are watching anime in the future, but it’s also kind of dumb to cut them out when they are completely relevant. This is particularly the case for split-cour shows or shows that are long-running.

This lack-of-the-present problem makes NagiAsu difficult to evaluate if it was pushed as a 2013 show (it’s not to say APR or Kotaku’s methodology is bad, but any fixed methodology based on air dates will have these kinds of problems). As a 2014 show it was awesome, so that’s how I’m looking at it.

The bigger, overarching problem, is that people are just throwing around rules without understanding what they’re doing. What context do air dates make sense? If you publish Newtype and are working on the stats and TV-guide stuff, sure. If you are an anime blogger, who cares? What does your audience care about anyway? If you are the APR, do you realize what the poll/questionnaire format means statistically? How does it skew the data? Does it serve or undermine the model? What is the goal? What’s the purpose or vision?

If you are playing it loose, I think most people understand what “this year’s anime” means. You can make exceptions for the Cowboy Bebops out there–to reduce noise on classics/long running shows namely–because the assumption is everyone knows about them. If the purpose is for discovery of shows people (of your readers’ estimated knowledge base) may not know, I think the effort is very straightforward. I mean, if you read comments on Kotaku’s annual posts every year someone talks about Cowboy Bebop. Com’on, your rules are dumb, they don’t even work and causes more problem than it solves, so why not get rid of it or make better ones?

Leave a comment | posted in Modern Visual Culture

December 30, 2014

Year in Review 2014: Event Log

By omo

I only write about eventing because I do it, okay? It’s not because I have any special insight or anything, but it would be nice to put into words why I spend so much time and money doing it, and how that time and money is spent. So here are some events I attended in 2014. I think I’m done attending for the year…

Mocho Nansu Sora

In this style—

1. IM@S Butai Aisatsu @Saitama with Nu/Kido/Mikku/Yuiton/Zekki – I was less than a meter away from them at one point. The yojos impressed but the cosplaying kansaijin cutie impressed more. Also how many more Haruka/Miki/Producer shikishi am I going to get?

2. Yukari Tamura Fruits Furits Cherry SSA (Saturday) – Dodged snow in US to fly to Japan only to find more snow. My first Yukarin live was pretty much an eye-opening experience too, and it’s definitely not the ideal sort of live for newbies. I had a good time and I can see how much fun it could have been if I knew the songs a lot better (and the calls a lot better).

3. IM@S Butai Aisatsu @Wald9 with Azumin/Mocho/Nansu/Tenchan- Mocho was Mocho on first sight. I became smitten with Mocho on first sight. Tenchan was strikingly beautiful. Nansu was not much to look at (literally, I was a little far from the stage and she is small) but she delivered her speech with conviction. Azumin was already in senpai mode. Also a long story behind this butai aisatsu to share if you poke me in person.

4. KOTOKO Kuuchu Puzzle bonus Live – It was great finally hanging out with Momotato after his ordeal, and doubly mind-warping learning about KOTOKO’s Raleigh trip at the same time as this live. KOTOKO showed her guts while I tried to not trip on the uneven flooring I was standing on half the time.

5. M@STERS of IDOL WORLD – Changed my life perhaps for the better. Also went to my first JP-style offkai, let alone my first IM@S live and all that jazz. A lot of other firsts too. HPT was born.

6. Nonnonbiyori live recording – I didn’t know Rieshon and Ayaneru can be this restrained. Sasuga Asumiss. Koiwai is also a cute.

7. Sakuracon – ELISA is gracious and lovely. Ishikawa Yui is kind of cute but pretty fresh. Most memorable part was talking about IM@S with the Aniplex animators throughout the con. I’m glad Aniplex/A-1 is doing their anime now. It just can’t be anyone else.

8. Anime Boston – JAM Project was great. Live Mask was dream-come-true, bucket list stuff. Good to see Asa-nee and Minaguchi-san again. Had a nice chat with Dai Sato that I really should publish…

9. Anime Central – Meeting Myu and the WUGs was wonderful, besides that I froze up. WUGner dinner/offkai was totally set up off-the-cuff, but big shoutout to the JP crew for being so cool. I had a great time at dinner despite the language barrier. JTV was born. I later marathoned Knight of Sidonia because of Angela’s OP. Hello Mr. Yamamoto, Mr. Hiro.

10. Anime North (Haramii North) – Seiyuu-wise, Haramii is the best personality I’ve met, on par with Noto. Hanamaru Cluster are cool guys, sup Ninbin, Sky)ry. Mai Goto was a cute. Shibata-san was legendary.

11. Anime Next – Luna is a cute nerd. Haruhi pose works well even if it’s pointed the wrong way aaaah. Luna NA fanclub start unofficially ww. Koyama and Waka are awesome. I guess you can expect as much behind the two people who made Inferno Cop.

12. Anime Expo – Terrible con aside, Angela was great. Lunatic Joker is wonderful. Kill la Kill crew is top. Aniplex delivers again. So many good guests actually. Good times were had.

13. Otakon – Doing Cyber Cyber with ALTIMA. Ojou and Motsu are cool, Sats is affable. Their Warner manager asked about my Myu happi. I have no words again. Hayamin was lovely and earnest. I will cheer for her. Also so many Ps! So many livers! Hanging out with my OG crew feels like the world is all one.

14. AWA – Ardith is almost guest-class by herself. Loverin Tamurin is solid. Shonen Knife even better. MiQ is top tier. There were BBQ and watching WUGchans getting scared in a hotel room, and watching @Paranda_update repping Hibiki with a VocaloidP once the Nunu connection is shown. Vocaloid force is stronger than ever. Attended my second Nihongo de OK ever in the same year.

15-18. Idol attack NYC series: Miku, Babymetal, Morning Musume ’14, Perfume. Local crew. Local brew. Maspi burger. Will do it again every time, except hopefully be able to book Yakiniku West for once. East Coast represent.

In 2015 I already have the following prospective events:

  • 1/16-17 – Lantis Festival Las Vegas – All set
  • 3/1 – Idolmaster Station!!! Public recording/concert – Ticket secured, TBD if PTO/Flight doable
  • 3/8 – WUG Solo Live (Myu) – Ticket secured
  • 3/13 – Masami Okui birthday live – In process
  • 3/14 – TryAngle Harmony public recording #3 – round 1 lottery in a couple weeks
  • 3/15 – I’ve 15th Anniversary Live – Ippan in progress
  • 4/4-4/5 – IDOLM@STER Million Live 2nd – round 1 lottery in 3 weeks
  • 4/3-4/5 – Anime Boston – First guest announced, alternative to ML 2nd.
  • ??? – IDOLM@STER 10th Anniversary Live – Logo revealed today LOL.
  • June – Anime Next – Local con don’t hurt to go.
  • July – Otakon – Semi-local con don’t hurt to go (usually).

Welp, maybe I’ll hit status even before 10th at this rate.

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Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Introspectives